Beginning with the under-studied Dasein poets, this chapter argues that during the Black Arts era, African American writers represented black people as fully of their times, partly by connecting the ...
More

Beginning with the under-studied Dasein poets, this chapter argues that during the Black Arts era, African American writers represented black people as fully of their times, partly by connecting the literary with the musical. A presentism founded on black identity and simultaneity (Heideggerian dasein, or “being there”) emerged, a presentism similar but not identical to that of the Harlem Renaissance.Less

“Seize the Time!” : Strategic Presentism in the Black Arts Movement

Daylanne K. English

Published in print: 2013-03-01

Beginning with the under-studied Dasein poets, this chapter argues that during the Black Arts era, African American writers represented black people as fully of their times, partly by connecting the literary with the musical. A presentism founded on black identity and simultaneity (Heideggerian dasein, or “being there”) emerged, a presentism similar but not identical to that of the Harlem Renaissance.

Each Hour Redeem will be the first monograph to focus on how time has been represented materially, politically, and philosophically throughout the African American literary tradition. It therefore ...
More

Each Hour Redeem will be the first monograph to focus on how time has been represented materially, politically, and philosophically throughout the African American literary tradition. It therefore offers a unified, though not a uniform, model through which to understand that tradition. This book argues that “strategic anachronism,” the use of prior literary forms to explore contemporary political realities and injustices, characterizes much African American literature, as in Walter Mosley’s recent use of hard-boiled detective fiction; it argues, by contrast, that “strategic presentism” characterizes the Black Arts Movement and the Harlem Renaissance and the two movements’ investment in present-day political potentialities, as in Hughes’s and Baraka’s use of the jazz of their respective eras for their poetic form and content. Overall, Political Fictions argues that across genre and era, African American writers have shown how time and justice work together as interdependent “political fictions,” to adapt a useful phrase from Pauline Hopkins’s 1900 novel, Contending Forces, wherein her African American hero declares, “Constitutional equity is a political fiction."Less

Each Hour Redeem : Time and Justice in African American Literature

Daylanne K. English

Published in print: 2013-03-01

Each Hour Redeem will be the first monograph to focus on how time has been represented materially, politically, and philosophically throughout the African American literary tradition. It therefore offers a unified, though not a uniform, model through which to understand that tradition. This book argues that “strategic anachronism,” the use of prior literary forms to explore contemporary political realities and injustices, characterizes much African American literature, as in Walter Mosley’s recent use of hard-boiled detective fiction; it argues, by contrast, that “strategic presentism” characterizes the Black Arts Movement and the Harlem Renaissance and the two movements’ investment in present-day political potentialities, as in Hughes’s and Baraka’s use of the jazz of their respective eras for their poetic form and content. Overall, Political Fictions argues that across genre and era, African American writers have shown how time and justice work together as interdependent “political fictions,” to adapt a useful phrase from Pauline Hopkins’s 1900 novel, Contending Forces, wherein her African American hero declares, “Constitutional equity is a political fiction."

I return to Suzan-Lori Parks, whose insight “Standard Time Line and Standard Plot Line are in cahoots!” appears as the first epigraph in the book. I focus on Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays in which she ...
More

I return to Suzan-Lori Parks, whose insight “Standard Time Line and Standard Plot Line are in cahoots!” appears as the first epigraph in the book. I focus on Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays in which she penned a play every day for an entire year; the plays were then performed across the nation over the course of a year, 2007. Parks’s project has seemingly overcome the problem with time, producing the “being there” that Mosley called for but could not represent.Less

Political Truths

Daylanne K. English

Published in print: 2013-03-01

I return to Suzan-Lori Parks, whose insight “Standard Time Line and Standard Plot Line are in cahoots!” appears as the first epigraph in the book. I focus on Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays in which she penned a play every day for an entire year; the plays were then performed across the nation over the course of a year, 2007. Parks’s project has seemingly overcome the problem with time, producing the “being there” that Mosley called for but could not represent.

I argue for literary, philosophical, and political motives in Walter Mosley’s return to a kind of writing born in and of 1930s cynicism, hard-boiled detective fiction. Like Richard Wright’s ...
More

I argue for literary, philosophical, and political motives in Walter Mosley’s return to a kind of writing born in and of 1930s cynicism, hard-boiled detective fiction. Like Richard Wright’s mid-century naturalism, Mosley’s choice of genre constitutes a complex form of strategic, literary anachronism that investigates the persistent bias within U.S. political histories, its penal system, and its philosophies.Less

Being Black There : Contemporary African American Detective Fiction

Daylanne K. English

Published in print: 2013-03-01

I argue for literary, philosophical, and political motives in Walter Mosley’s return to a kind of writing born in and of 1930s cynicism, hard-boiled detective fiction. Like Richard Wright’s mid-century naturalism, Mosley’s choice of genre constitutes a complex form of strategic, literary anachronism that investigates the persistent bias within U.S. political histories, its penal system, and its philosophies.

I develop the relationship between the material history of timekeeping and the content and form of 18th and 19th century African American and Black Atlantic texts, including: Gronniosaw’s and ...
More

I develop the relationship between the material history of timekeeping and the content and form of 18th and 19th century African American and Black Atlantic texts, including: Gronniosaw’s and Equiano’s slave narratives, Wheatley’s poetry, and Douglass’s autobiographies. I argue that early African American writers’ ideas about, and experiences of, time produce more useful tropes than does Gates’s discursive “talking book.”Less

Ticking, Not Talking: Timekeeping in Early African American Literature

Daylanne K. English

Published in print: 2013-03-01

I develop the relationship between the material history of timekeeping and the content and form of 18th and 19th century African American and Black Atlantic texts, including: Gronniosaw’s and Equiano’s slave narratives, Wheatley’s poetry, and Douglass’s autobiographies. I argue that early African American writers’ ideas about, and experiences of, time produce more useful tropes than does Gates’s discursive “talking book.”

I focus on Grimké’s anti-lynching play Rachel (1916), Wright’s naturalist novel Native Son (1940), Gaines’s elegiac novel A Lesson Before Dying (1994), and Parks’s postmodern play The Death of the ...
More

I focus on Grimké’s anti-lynching play Rachel (1916), Wright’s naturalist novel Native Son (1940), Gaines’s elegiac novel A Lesson Before Dying (1994), and Parks’s postmodern play The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), arguing that these apparently quite disparate texts all take black male mortality as their content and repetition as their fundamental form, signifying the persistence of racially coded justice across time.Less

“The Death of the Last Black Man” : Repetition, Lynching, and Capital Punishment in Twentieth-Century African American Literature

Daylanne K. English

Published in print: 2013-03-01

I focus on Grimké’s anti-lynching play Rachel (1916), Wright’s naturalist novel Native Son (1940), Gaines’s elegiac novel A Lesson Before Dying (1994), and Parks’s postmodern play The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), arguing that these apparently quite disparate texts all take black male mortality as their content and repetition as their fundamental form, signifying the persistence of racially coded justice across time.

Oliver Wendell Holmes’s most famous pragmatist legal saying was that “the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” I argue that Hopkins, Chesnutt and Dunbar published novels in ...
More

Oliver Wendell Holmes’s most famous pragmatist legal saying was that “the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” I argue that Hopkins, Chesnutt and Dunbar published novels in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that challenged American philosophical pragmatism by representing racially specific experiences of law and time.Less

“Temporal Damage”: Pragmatism and Plessy in African American Novels, 1896–1902

Daylanne K. English

Published in print: 2013-03-01

Oliver Wendell Holmes’s most famous pragmatist legal saying was that “the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” I argue that Hopkins, Chesnutt and Dunbar published novels in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that challenged American philosophical pragmatism by representing racially specific experiences of law and time.